Apple's event is going on right now - and most of the new stuff already leaked weeks and months ahead of time. So, we're getting an iPhone 5S, an iPhone 5C, and iOS7 will be available later this month. I like the design of the 5C more than of the 5S; it's more playful, colourful - harking back to the coloured iMacs and PowerMac G3s. Too bad it doesn't come in red.

The fingerprint sensor in the 5S is interesting, but I wonder how accurate it will be in the real world; on top of that, with all the NSA news, I'm not particularly keen on Apple reading my fingerprint all the time. Supposedly, applications don't have access to it and it's not stored in the cloud, but I have little to no trust for companies.

The biggest news for me is the fact that the iPhone 5S has a new chip - the A7 - which has the honour of being the first 64bit chip inside a smartphone. iOS7 and first party Apple applications are all 64bit, and Xcode obviously supports it. While this obviously future-proofs the platform for more RAM, I wonder what other motives are involved here. ARM desktops and laptops, perhaps?

I doubt 64bit will provide much benefit today, but you have to hand it to Apple: at least they're done with the transition before it's even needed.

ASLR techniques work with the width of the address bits, in this case is 48 bits for ARM v8, not on the width of the virtual 64 bits address space.

64 bit brings very little, as of now, to the mobile market. Specially given how Apple tends to be very stingy with the memory size of their iPad/iPhone systems (gotta keep those margins as high as possible) I think the improved GPU is what will affect the user's experience the most. If anything, I think Apple is testing the waters to go with ARM for some of their desktops or laptops.

BTW ASLR is not done at the application level, or at least it's not done so most implementation/techniques I have read about in the literature.

But yeah, I think apple gunning to be the first ARM v8 device vendor, to me at least, indicates they're going for their custom ARM-based parts being used on spectrum of products as broad as possible; from phones, tables, to even low end desktops and laptops. That would cut their ASIC production costs significantly, and reduce their dependence on Intel parts for the OSX devices.